‘It wasn’t a battle because we offered no resistance.’
Photograph: David Rose

We were heading to the Stonehenge Free Festival, about 600 of us in 140 vehicles, known as the Peace Convoy. English Heritage was afraid the sacred stones might be damaged, and had taken out a last-minute injunction banning the festival. We thought it would still go ahead, though we didn’t know who would be playing. That didn’t matter: it was all about having a good time.

There was a strong political undercurrent. The Battle of Orgreave had taken place a year earlier, where police clashed with miners in south Yorkshire. It felt as if hippies had become the new enemies of the state merely for choosing an alternative lifestyle. We were viewed as outlaws.

I had joined the convoy a couple of years earlier. I was doing a degree at Edinburgh Art College, but dropped out after I became pregnant and returned home to Fife. A double-decker bus full of travellers turned up one day; I got to know them and decided to join. It was a way to escape my dysfunctional family. My mother died when I was young and my dad had been a wrong ’un. We travelled around, parking on council land, gravel pits and common land. Larger groups of travellers would come together in the summer to attend free festivals around the country.

On that incredibly hot day in 1985, we encountered road blocks on the way to Stonehenge and ended up marooned on farmland seven miles from the site. We parked in a broad bean field and, over a few hours, watched as the police numbers swelled to about 1,300. We could sense the mood changing, so I stuck a sign in the windscreen: “Six-month-old baby on board. We don’t want any trouble.”

Soon after, I was pulled out of the bus, even though I had my daughter Kaya in my arms. The copper with me in the photograph looks as if he’s helping, leading me to safety, but he was only doing it for the sake of the cameras. Once we got to the field, he pushed me away to join others who were being arrested for obstructing the police and the highway: 537 travellers were arrested that day, apparently the UK’s largest mass arrest since the second world war. Most were dispersed to various police cells, but my partner was injured, so I went to the hospital with him in an ambulance.

This shot has been in newspapers and magazines all over the world, and on books. Melody Maker used it on the 10th anniversary of what become known as the Battle of the Beanfield. But it wasn’t a battle, because we offered no resistance. Until she was about five, Kaya sobbed whenever she saw anyone in police uniform. The memory must have remained from being a baby.

I still live as a traveller. We’re in Dorset at the moment. I have two other children – Lilo Lil, 24, and Jonni Piston, 19 – and three grandchildren. For the most part, our kids have married within our community. Whatever they tried to do us 30 years ago, it didn’t work; it made us stronger. After 1985, there was no free festival at Stonehenge again, but we returned to the field later that year and picked beans to make hippy stew.